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More Coming on Warming From French Academy

PARIS—Revelations and contradictions from the closed-door debate on climate change at the French Academy of Sciences yesterday continue to make their way into the press, but how much was achieved will not be clear until the report is published towards the end of October.

Research minister Valérie Pécresse said in a letter academy President Jean Salençon that there should be "maximum transparency," the daily newspaper Libération reported. All the contributions for the debate were leaked to the newspaper, and are now online, and several participants have commented on the proceedings to Libération and Le Monde.

The debate is an official response to a petition of more than 600 scientists, who protested a book by former research minister Claude Allègre L'Imposture Climatique (The Climate Fraud). Discussions were tense, presentations brief, and climatologists lamented the presence of nonspecialists. The arguments of Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were contested by Sandrine Bony of the French Dynamic Meteorological Laboratory, Libération said.